politics

These blog-posts are about the intersection between anthropology and politics. They are often guided by the wisdom of Michel-Rolph Trouillot in Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World.

Many people believe anthropology should have nothing to do with politics or that anthropology can only analyze political configurations but not contribute to them. Others believe that their academic anthropology job is their politics. Trouillot pushed for a middle ground, an academia that was not explicitly political while insisting that anthropologists should have academic projects outside of academia. As Trouillot once commented in a seminar, an academic anthropology job is not activism: “You can’t have your job and eat it too.”

Here are some classroom resources that might be helpful:

• The 2021 Intro-to-Anthropology class on politics using the textbook Anthropology: What does it mean to be human?
• The 2020 Intro-to-Anthro class on political organization using the textbook Through the Lens of Anthropology.
• The Cultural Anthropology 2020 class on politics and power using the textbook Essentials of Cultural Anthropology.
• This Anthropology 2017 class attempted to ask the question “Why does politics matter?”